Salman Rushdie was 41 when his novel The Satanic Verses was published in 1988. A year later, in 1989, Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa calling on Muslims to kill Rushdie. 33 years later, Rushdie was stabbed multiple times by an attacker acting on the fatwa, causing him to lose vision in one eye.
The attacker, Hadi Matar, was not even born when the fatwa was issued. he came like a little missileRushdie later said.
So what is the meaning of such horrific fatwas due to which a large number of independent thinkers, writers critical of Islam and journalists are living in constant fear for their lives and dozens of people have been attacked?
The fatwa issued against Salman Rushdie by Islamic clerics is virtually tantamount to a death sentence.
The fatwa was not upheld by the Iranian government after Khomeini’s death and his successor as president, Mohammad Khatami.
But in a world full of religious fanatics, this did not matter. There were many self-proclaimed soldiers who were willing to perform their sacred duty to protect their religion.
There are not just one or two, but thousands of trained terrorists, sleeper cells and blind followers of these clerics who are waiting for the right time and place to carry out this act.
This is not the first time Rushdie has been attacked in New York. Many novelists and journalists from Islamic countries have been attacked before him for speaking out against Islam. They have been deported or arrested. The works of others who criticize Islam have been banned.
On 14 October 1994, a Muslim fanatic stabbed Egyptian Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz several times in the neck. This fanatic was also inspired by a fatwa.
According to a Reuters report, in recent years Muslim militants and jihadist leaders have used social media to send a message to Muslims that those who speak ill of Islam and the Prophet should be killed.
What is a fatwa and what is its duration?
The word fatwa means clarification. Simply put, it means a ruling by an authority.
Fatwas have been issued on a number of religious, legal, and moral questions since the early Islamic period in the seventh century.
A fatwa or legal order is issued by Islamic law or Islamic religious leaders and scholars on a range of issues, including issues concerning an individual. It is not binding.
The fatwa issued in Rushdie’s case calling for the death of an individual is issued when Islam or the Prophet is insulted.
These are issued by Islamic law scholars or ulema to give judgements on important matters concerning Islam.
In the case of India, an important Islamic seminary is the Darul Uloom located in Deoband, which operates according to its own Deobandi law. According to The Conversation, it has issued fatwas in 12 volumes.
One scholar has even compared reading the book of fatwas to the proceedings of the US Supreme Court.
Fatwas may also be necessary in matters that are not mentioned in detail in the Quran.
As far as the life of the fatwa is concerned
There is no time limit on fatwas and they cannot be reversed.
In Rushdie’s case, Khomeini had declared Rushdie’s book blasphemous, and he also placed a bounty on his head in 1989. The attack happened 33 years later in 2022.
Who enforces the fatwa imposing death penalty?
Lama Abu-Odeh, a professor at the Georgetown University Law Center, told The Washington Post that following Khomeini’s edict against Rushdie, fatwas have often been treated in the West as equivalent to a death sentence.
“There is no historical precedent or basis for the general public to use vigilante justice to sentence someone to death for their statements and for anyone to follow such instructions,” Intisar Rabb, director of Harvard Law School’s Islamic law program, told The Washington Post.
However, in the past few decades, a number of Sunni Muslim and jihadist leaders have issued fatwas calling for the death of Muslims they consider infidels.
These are adopted by militants and followers who want to answer the call of a religious leader and fulfill their duty.
The same thing happened in Rushdie’s case. Hadi Matar heard Khomeini’s call 33 years later in 2022.
The attacker, Hadi Matar, is now being charged with the following: Terrorism in the name of Hezbollah (Hezbollah), which has been designated a terrorist group by the United States.
However, self-proclaimed warriors have taken up axes and daggers for the faith. People have been brutally murdered even without any fatwa.
Tailor Kanhaiya Lal Teli was murdered in his shop in Udaipur Two radical Muslim men posed with blood-soaked knives and circulated a video of the brutal June 2022 murder.
Kanhaiya Lal’s mistake was that he posted on social media a photo of suspended BJP spokesperson Nupur Sharma, who had made comments on Prophet Mohammad, which some people found controversial.
Islamic state authority and fatwa
Arab governments that are allies of the West have not been able to stop their religious leaders from issuing such fatwas. They have also not been able to support their independent thinkers and writers who have been put on death lists by Islamic fundamentalists.
One example of this is Egypt’s highest Islamic institution, the state-funded Al Azhar, which banned Egyptian Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz’s book Children of the Alley.
In 1994, Mahfouz was attacked by a Muslim extremist. This attack was also carried out in response to a fatwa issued by Omar Abdel-Rahman, a Sunni extremist cleric who was then the head of Al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya.
The attacker arrived in a white Mercedes-Benz and Mahfouz thought he wanted to shake hands with him. The attacker stabbed Mahfouz several times in the neck and fled the scene. The author survived the attack.
According to Reuters report, some secular thinkers believe that mere public condemnation by Al Azhar scholars is tantamount to a death sentence.
Saudi Arabia’s judicial system is based on Sharia, or Islamic law, and its judges belong to the Wahhabi school of Sunni Islam. In this interpretation, religious crimes such as blasphemy can be punishable by death.
Controversial fatwas issued across the world
In 1992, another Egyptian writer, Farag Fouda, was shot dead by two Islamist group members. Al Azhar accused him of being an enemy of Islam.
A fatwa was signed by the ‘World Islamic Front for Jihad against Jews and Crusaders’ (Al-Qaeda) in 1998. Osama bin Laden was one of its five signatories. It condemned the US and Israel soon after the bombing of the US embassies in Nairobi, Kenya and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, Africa.
Another fatwa was issued that same year, prohibiting Abdulaziz Sachedina, a professor at the University of Virginia, from teaching Islam because he had preached acceptance of pluralism in his writings. This fatwa was issued by Iraq’s Grand Ayatollah Sistani.
A fatwa was also issued in 2004, calling for a boycott of Israeli and American products in support of Palestinian interests.
Over the past four years, several fatwas have been issued in support of Gaza. These fatwas have been issued by the Grand Mufti of the Palestinian Authority, the Islamic Fiqh Council of Sudan, Mauritanian Muslim clerics, the Indonesian Ulema Council, and Turkey’s governmental Directorate of Religious Affairs.
As the number of controversial fatwas has increased, so has the number of people who are always ready to follow those orders. This is the curse of a polarized and radicalized world.